Word: moment
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When I read this, I recalled the Christmas party my father hosted last month for the 50 psychiatrists who work at his hospital. Over a period of about three hours, the most exciting moment must have been when we ran out of ice for cocktails and I had to go to the freezer to get more. At one point, one of the psychiatrists sneezed without excusing himself...
...That Sugar Cubes or Sinead O'Connor album that you played over and over again for a few months until it was warped and then you never listened to it again when the trend faded--if you own those albums on C.D. you won't remember that brief shining moment when you couldn't get the damned records off your turntable...
...terror lies first in the surprise. An earthquake is hidden from one moment to the next, as the future is hidden, as God is hidden. The event does not announce itself as most other disasters do, as a hurricane does, or a flood, or even an erupting volcano, which is after all hard to miss as dangerous geography. A plague too arrives more slowly. That is no consolation, but at least the mind and nerves are prepared. The event proceeds in a logical continuum of developing bad news...
...many years one may have lived on top of the San Andreas fault and made doomy jokes about it; it is like having a violent beast in the basement, knowing that one day it may burst up through the living-room floor. But there is no preparation for the moment. Only certain animals feel premonitory vibrations undetectable to humans. They grow skittish. Horses glare with a wild panicked...
There may be something perversely cathartic about earthquakes. For some time mankind has been in the business of manufacturing its own disasters -- wars, acid rain and other pollutions, drugs, a globe aswarm with refugees. Perhaps it is a relief for a moment to be face to face with a disaster that man did not invent, a cataclysm that has at least a sort of innocence of origin in larger powers...